Malindi Station contribution to the Global Climate Change assessment

摘要

The San Marco Equatorial Range in Kenya (Malindi) has been equipped with a direct ingestion system able to acquire SAR data of ERS-1 and 2 using the 10 m S/L/X band antenna available at the station. After a past activity regarding the acquisition during the TANDEM mission campaign, the antenna has been recently used to re-start the operation. Moreover, an L-band system, completely dedicated to NOAA and Seastar (ORBVIEW/2) data acquisition, will be installed soon. This will integrate the weekly sounding performed with meteorological balloons in order to monitor the ozone, temperature, pressure, humidity and wind profiles at these tropical latitudes. Environmental data analysis is performed on the basis of algorithms already tested like the GSWT (General Split Window Technique) developed at CRPSM and used by ESA for the World Land Surface Temperature Project In this paper we describe the application of this algorithm to the equatorial area and the attempt of making the SST and LST retrieved values accurate enough to satisfy the requirement of a Global Climate Change assessment This result can be obtained by improving the corrective terms, such as the evaluation of the atmospheric and non-black body effect on satellite data by means of a comparison with ground based measurements and ancillary data computed locally. For the future MODE (NASA) and MERIS (ESA) sensors to be lunched in the next years, the above mentioned algorithm should exploit the higher number of opportunely designed bands in order to obtain the information necessary for an even more accurate LST and SST estimate.